Hello, I you submit to article directories and others legitamately use the article for content on their website, wont Google penalize the author for duplicated content? Thanks
Why would it penalize the author? It might penalize the sites that republish but the author has no fault nor control on who republish the content. Duplicated content is an issue when you steal content from other sites and when you have the same content in different pages in you website. One of the link building technique that has always been recommended is to have good enough content (images, software, etc) so that people syndicate you, so no, the author or owner of the content (as long as the republisher provides a link back to the original source) would actually receive the benefits.
I agree. First I think the whole issue with duplicate content is misunderstood and lots of inaccurate info is written about it. Also isn't the purpose a writing an article in the hope that it will become popular and republished (with proper credit), referenced or linked to....thus creating possibly lots of valuable backlinks?
Check out this definition of duplicate article by google.. _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html
Duplicate content is *really* misunderstood. The Associated Press and Reuters are not penalized when *their* articles are reprinted across the internet thousands or tens of thousands of times. There is a really good article here that in my opinion, really covers the duplicate content issue.